Serious games are thought to foster young children’s learning by making the learning experience more fun and engaging. However, a study in Computers & Education shows that success of serious gameplay highly depends on children’s ability to regulate their attention and behavior.

The present study shows that children’s attentional control contributes to formulating strategies and problem-solving in new games, while their action control underlies sustained and goal-directed learning over time.

Executive functions such as inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility make it possible to control, plan, and direct processes on the level of cognition, behavior and motivation. They help to stay focused and being involved, to hold information in mind, to solve problems, and to understand other perspectives. Numerous studies have shown the crucial benefits of executive functions to outcome measures such as academic achievements, but the underlying processes of these benefits are still much unclear. This workshop aims at a deeper elaboration of these underlying processes; It involves questions about how executive functions benefit development rather than whether. With educational and neurocognitive perspectives, it aims at further insights into how executive functions foster the online processes in learning and behavior, and how these processes can be stimulated through interventions.

For more information about the workshop, speakers, and abstracts: http://www.ru.nl/bsi/news-events/evenementen/workshop-how/

Children that have trouble with changing situations, paying attention, and staying on tasks (‘executive functions’), generally remain behind with academic skills such as reading, math, and social skills. But executive functions can be ameliorated, resulting in higher benefits from education.

Ample evidence has shown that subjective measures of executive control in kindergarten strongly contribute to the emergence of reading. In the present study, we examined this relation more thoroughly, by considering contributions of objective direct self-measures of both attentional control and behavioral control to the developmental trajectory from phonological awareness in kindergarten to subsequent decoding in first grade. Results show that executive control allows the development of reading abilities that predate formal reading instruction via the advancements in phonological awareness.